DAVE NEESE: Trump won’t finish his first term in office

Donald Trump is shaping up as a tragic protagonist. Tragic in the classic sense of the word. A man destined to be brought down by his own flawed character.

The professors say what’s at work here is something Aristotle called “hamartia.” Hamartia is a trait that, programmed into a man’s character, contributes to his rise and — eventually, inevitably — his fall. Sort of like hubris or chutzpah.

Shakespeare mined the concept for the material of his tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, etc. But on this topic the Bible was way ahead of the Bard.

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” says Proverbs.

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Pride and a haughty spirit — that’s Trump to a gold-lettered “T,” is it not? Trump was taken in by New York’s anthem. “If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.” Maybe not entirely true.

“King of the hill, top of the heap,” name emblazoned on Gotham’s glittery marquees. . .Trump’s spectacular New York success lies at the heart of his hamartia, his programmed-in undoing.

Grub-staked a small fortune by his father, Donald Trump nevertheless was nouveau riche to his core. And the nouveau riche have always been the true, trouble-making revolutionaries. It is they who in economic affairs, at least in America, have disrupted the accustomed order of things, not the eggheads spouting Marx.

Trump’s father had the good sense to confine his real estate activities to the Bronx side of the river. He left the older money undisturbed in its exclusionary business and social rites, tranquil in the mahogany-lined, leather-upholstered clubs of Manhattan.

Donald lacked the old man’s prudence and reticence. The son was always a too-loud, too-ostentatious arriviste.

Real estate development in New York is a Darwinian struggle, a survival-of-the-fittest contest. The successful prevail only by adapting to an environment rife with labor union, white collar and political sleaze.

What kind of fossil record was left behind from Trump’s era of Gotham wheeling and dealing?

The square-jawed gray eminence — Mr. Robert Mueller — the Grand Inquisitor/Special Prosecutor — will be answering that question one day soon.

Can Trump withstand such scrutiny as he’s now about to receive? Could any man? Even an ordinary schlub?

Attorney/author Harvey Silverglate (Princeton/Harvard Law) says the federal code is such a tangled mass of statutory verbosity — not to mention all the regulatory sophistry pursuant thereto — that any given American on any given day likely runs afoul of at least three felonies tucked away in Westlaw tomes weighing down sway-back shelves in cavernous law libraries.

The old saw that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to vote a true bill against a ham sandwich may not tell the half of the story.

No matter how many millions of dollars in taxes Trump has paid, what fool would wager against the proposition that it was arguably less than he was obliged to fork over under, say, Title 26, Subtitle Y, Chapter 8639, Subchapter 761, Part LXVII, Sec. 63503(g)(h)(i) et seq. of the Unites States Code?

In all of Trump’s artful deals, is it conceivable he didn’t leave a “t” uncrossed here, an “i” undotted there?

Even as subpoenas go out, the media mob is running to fetch the rope. And Trump realizes it, according to Pat Buchanan. From his Nixon Watergate days, Buchanan surely knows a thing or two about turmoil and treachery in the Swamp.

Trump keenly senses his legal danger, says Buchanan. This, he adds, is why he’s been so freaked out over the way his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the “Putin-collusion” snipe hunt. The recusal cleared the way for Cap’n’ Ahab Mueller’s Great White Whale fishing expedition.

Trump’s hubris probably kept him from sensing danger sooner. The day he took the lead in the GOP primary polls, Trump no longer was merely roiling the city council’s zoning subcommittee or the Metropolitan Club’s movers and shakers.

As he rose in the polls he was messing with a real-life version of an amoeboidal entity like the one in the 1958 horror flick, “The Blob.” Trump was threatening to drain The Blob’s habitat.

In reigning over the Swamp, The Blob adheres to a more or less sluggish existence. Indeed, under normal circumstances it’s hard to detect signs of life in The Blob. But The Blob is nothing if not ferocious when its existence is put in jeopardy. It begins to quiver and pulsate menacingly.

As the GOP primaries rolled on, a frightful insight began to form in cartoon blurbs over the heads of the party’s dukes and earls. This un-housebroken interloper, this vulgar Gatsby, this big city Berzelius Windrip, this billionaire Babbitt, this boondocks-rousing Elmer Gantry just might create real havoc!

Trump’s hubris probably fogged up his vision. He at first failed to see the danger he was riling up. Machiavelli himself warned that there’s nothing more “dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things.”

Not, mind you, that there’s anything about Trump’s agenda that’s even remotely radical to ordinary folks. Proposing a more strict enforcement of the immigration laws; proposing a more skeptical approach to trade deals; proposing a thinning-out of the regulatory weed patch — this is hardly the stuff of wild-eyed, revolutionary Jacobinism.

Nor are tax cuts. Nor is wariness of missionary efforts to convert backward, hostile populations in distant foreign lands to Madisonian constitutionalism in the name of “fighting terrorism.”

All the same, Trump has aroused The Blob. The Swamp is suddenly all aflutter and atwitter with alarmed activity. There’s now an excited hustle and bustle rallying around the Swamp status quo.

The Blob’s playing for keeps. This is apparent in the fact that to bring down Trump it was willing to start Cold War II with Russia, a nation essential to avoiding cataclysmic kabooms in such powder-keg places as the Korean Peninsula, the South China Sea, Iran and Syria.

But The Blob seems to look upon the prospect of all-out war with cud-chewing, bovine equanimity. What worries The Blob is Trump, Trump, Trump.

Will Trump decide the only way to distract The Blob is to wade into some foreign saloon brawl waving Old Glory? The scary question of war doesn’t seem of much concern around the Swamp right now.

No, what scares the holy bejeebers out of Nancy Pelosi AND Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer AND Mitch McConnell, is the suspicion that Trump is half-serious about his “America First” agenda.

That would be a radical turn of events indeed if he is. According to American political custom, agendas aren’t intended to be actual plans of action. They’re mere carnival-barker come-ons to get the rubes inside the tent for the election day sideshow.

It’s astonishing that Trump — a carnival barker extraordinaire himself — failed to see this.

Meanwhile, the ineluctable force of hamartia goes on doing its thing. Meaning that Trump’s days are numbered.

Prediction: Barring divine intervention or some other such momentous but unlikely event, Trump’s out in three.

Dave Neese grew up on a Midwest farm, received a degree in Slavic Studies (Russian lit), Indiana U., did stints in the U.S. Army and in various news and other jobs from New Hampshire to California. At The Trentonian he covered the Statehouse and was editorial page editor. He won N.J. Press Association awards in numerous categories. Email: davidneese@verizon.net